The Iron Law of ProhibitionHow Banning Drugs Only Makes Them More Dangerous

Once alcohol was made illegal in 1920, alcohol consumption continued in full force, but the type of alcohol consumed changed dramatically. Softer drinks, such as beer, become uncommon while highly potent liquors were the norm. Among the most infamous was known as “White Lightning” Moonshine, which was known to make people go blind.

For many proponents of prohibition, this served as validation that making alcohol consumption a crime was a worthy cause. Why would you legalize something that is so evidently harmful? But despite this apparent vindication, alcohol prohibition ended after barely more than a decade, and upon legalization, liquors like White Lightning were replaced once again by safer and less potent drinks.

This phenomenon is known as the Iron Law of Prohibition, which posits that as substance prohibition laws are increasingly enforced, the potency of the substance increases.

Given a little thought, this makes perfect sense. When a substance is prohibited, it has to be smuggled into the country, thus making the most concentrated form of it the most economical. Once it’s inside the country, it can then be diluted in various forms, such as the cutting of heroin or the mixing of liquors. If Al Capone and his men were going to risk jail time to smuggle a truck full of alcohol across the border, it makes the most economic sense to smuggle 200 proof moonshine rather than 3 proof beer.

Thus, the Iron Law of Prohibition is an economic law. And as with any economic phenomenon, incentives drive the results.

The Iron Law of Prohibition can be observed with every major drug smuggled into the United States today. For marijuana, this is evident in THC levels. In Amsterdam, where marijuana is effectively legal (technically, the Netherlands is still a party to the United Nations narcotics Protocols which they signed in 1987), it is commonly believed that visitors find more potent marijuana in their euphemistically labeled “coffee shops.” What is less known is that most of the Amsterdam strains of marijuana were originally cultivated illegally in California.

The increase of THC levels came about as the result of two increases in marijuana enforcement. The first came under Richard Nixon when he pushed the Mexican government to spray paraquat on Mexican marijuana fields (under the threat of revoking foreign aid money), thus destroying the major supply of marijuana to the United States in the early 70s. This forced pot smokers to grow their own marijuana, and the colder climate of the United States required that they switch from Cannabis Sativa, which was the marijuana grown in Latin America, to the generally more potent Cannabis Indica which could survive better in the early autumn frosts.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sent the army into California to destroy marijuana fields which drove cultivation in doors, and this led to experimentation with cultivating more potent and varied strands of marijuana hybrids (mixtures of sativa and indica). The THC levels of the plant went from roughly 1-3% in the original Mexican sativa, to upwards of 20% or more in the US hybrids.

More dangerously, though, the Iron Law of Prohibition brought about some of the hardest drugs we have today. As opium smoking was cracked down on (due largely to racism against the Chinese), people shifted toward morphine and, ultimately, heroin – the most potent opiate. When the Reagan administration started attacking cocaine in the 1980s, users began to mix it with baking soda to create the stronger and deadlier crack rocks. As amphetamines became less obtainable, addicts started to produce the glassy, smokable compound we know as Crystal Meth. Each of these substances is more concentrated and, with the possible exception of marijuana, more dangerous than the substance from which it derived.

Even when this is pointed out, though, prohibitionists like to argue that now that these substances exist, people will continue to use them. This appears to be fallacious. We already know that this did not take place following the re-legalization of alcohol. It also seems to not be the case in countries that have either decriminalized or legalized drugs, such as the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland.

What we do see exposes a few interesting misconceptions about drug addiction. It is commonly argued that drug consumption increases after prohibition and decreases once prohibition ends (the Forbidden Fruit theory). This is not necessarily true. In the Netherlands, for example, marijuana use rose modestly following its decriminalization. However, we do see that HARD drug use decreases as people move either to less concentrated forms of the drugs, as they did with alcohol, or from harder to softer drugs, such as marijuana. While marijuana use increased by a very small amount, hard drug use (including alcohol use) decreased.

We also observe that in the case of harder drugs, the dangers not only derive from the higher concentration that appeals to smugglers, but also the subsequent dilution of the substance that appeals to the street dealers once it is inside the country. White Lighting Moonshine was dangerous because people added methanol to their concoction to increase potency, which led to the cases of blindness.

Heroin is perhaps an even more interesting example, though. Here, the concept of “chasing the dragon,” (originally this was the “chasing” of opium vapor, but in modern usage, it refers to the idea that addicts chase their high until they overdose) is completely untrue. Heroin overdoses nearly always occur as a result of an unknown potency. Once heroin has been smuggled into a country, it is “cut” with other substances, thus lowering the concentration before sale. Addicts, as a result, cannot uniformly measure their dosage, and if they happen to purchase heroin that is less diluted than that which they are accustomed to, they are liable to accidentally overdose.

When pharmacy-grade heroin was made legally accessible in Portugal (among other examples), with no limitation placed on the obtainable amount, the Portuguese observed that addicts would initially increase their heroin usage to a certain point, at which their doses would level off, and eventually, they would voluntarily lower their heroin intake (this contradicting classic addiction theory). In such environments, the average addiction period for heroin users was about 10 years, with the addict coming off of heroin voluntarily, and without rehab programs.

None of this is to say that drugs are not dangerous. Even if they were legal, there would still be dangers involved (with the possible exception to marijuana, which has seen refutation of some of its most heavily-cited dangers), just as there are dangers with alcohol and tobacco and junk food. But understanding the Iron Law of Prohibition helps illuminate exactly why the dangers of drug use is exponentially increased following prohibition laws.

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